Attention

At Nudge, we measure attention as a key metric for content performance. Attention, measured in seconds, is the time that a person is actively consuming the content. It is slightly different from ‘ Time on page’, and usually lower because we pause the clock when the person leaves the page, reads other content, or becomes inactive on the page.

For instance, if you click to the content and switch to other tabs without closing the content, Nudge would pause the tracking until you come back and actively read the content.

Nudge’s attention metric usually has two distinct neighbours, which help illustrate it’s position, and effectiveness. The first is Google’s “ time on page ”. This takes the difference in time the user is seen from page A to page B. The issues with this:

If the user does not visit page B- which has to be under the same Google Analytics account- you are unable to record a value for this user.
If the user visits page A, then visits 3 other sites, before visiting page B, Google will not capture this path. It will add the time spent on the 3 other sites to page A.
If the user is inactive on page A for 25 minutes, and then visits page B, page A will be recorded as 25 minutes. This is“technically” accurate, but the user being inactive on the site for 24 of those 25 minutes removes any signal from the metric.

The other metric is other applications’ attention seconds. We’ve found that, in almost every case, that other applications put less of a focus on the accuracy of this metric. We see applications checking every 30 seconds, 60 seconds, or even 5 minutes! This means that if a user spends 29 seconds on page, they will - best case - be recorded as 0 seconds. If they spend 59 seconds, they will be recorded as 30. This loses a huge amount of data. With Nudge focusing so heavily on this metric, we collect data at least once per second. This gives us an incredible amount of accuracy, when compared to other products.

Attention seconds is a major indicator for post-click traffic quality. This metric is important as some content is consumed but not shared, i.e. health topics, this helps give a balanced measure. Marketers need an objective way to compare the return on investment of different kinds of mediums, measuring active attention time is one way of doing that.

Nudge also allows you to compare different traffic sources, by understanding their post-click performance you can see where money is best spent. For example in a recent campaign Facebook was driving 90 attention seconds vs 42 on Twitter, this does vary campaign to campaign.